Showing posts sorted by relevance for query social capital. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query social capital. Sort by date Show all posts

Monday, November 01, 2021

World Bank report recognises importance of measurement beyond GDP

Reports and Proceedings

UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

The World Bank’s flagship report, The Changing Wealth of Nations, for the first time emphasises the importance of social capital to sustainability. By including the role of trust, social norms and community cohesiveness in securing a sustainable future, it represents a major advance in the international effort to go beyond GDP for the measurement of progress.

Cambridge economists Matthew Agarwala and Dimitri Zenghelis make the case in the report that social capital is an essential asset with the capacity to improve productivity and growth, and help address the challenges faced by modern society.

“Our ability to promote wellbeing in the community and to prosper economically revolves around trust, dignity, and respect. It hinges on our connection with others and with the institutional resources that support us,” says Zenghelis, Bennett Institute for Public Policy, University of Cambridge.

“The Bennett Institute’s Wealth Economy project demonstrates that social capital statistics can reveal important insights into economic performance, resilience to shocks (including war and pandemics), and where to target funds for levelling-up. The aim is to establish guidelines for standardised comparative measures for use in economic research and crucially, to hold governments’ feet to the fire. Such an effort is long overdue and the potential returns for society are hard to overstate.

“The inclusion of our research in the world’s longest running series on wealth accounting brings us one step closer to recognising social capital as an economic asset that underpins national and global wealth.”

Chapter 15 on Social Capital and the Changing Wealth of Nations by Agarwala and Zenghelis outlines several priorities for policymakers to recognise:

First, trust, networks, social interactions, and the ability to achieve outcomes requiring collective action are important determinants of social, health, and economic outcomes.

Second, the lack of a precise and universally accepted definition has undermined its measurement, valuation, and integration into mainstream economic analyses, but the UK and United States are pioneering new approaches.

Third, the fact that social capital is not directly measured in monetary terms in no way reduces its importance to economic performance. Just as it did for natural capital, the evolution from theoretical concept to consistent accounting will take decades of development and refinement.

Fourth, progress in survey penetration and the use of higher frequency data offer great potential for social capital research.

Finally, it recommends the Changing Wealth of Nations continues to examine how social capital relates to, and interacts with, wealth accounting.

“A better understanding of measuring wealth – including human, social, natural and physical capital – is important for a green, resilient, and prosperous future,” says Agarwala, Project leader for the Wealth Economy, Bennett Institute. “It’s crucial for all assets to be measured with equal importance for governments to get policies right for sustainable development.”

The World Bank’s Changing Wealth of Nations 2021 report provides data for a more comprehensive view of economic growth and sustainability. Published in late October 2021, it finds that the share of total global wealth in renewable natural capital is decreasing and threatened by climate change. Also that global wealth has grown overall but at the expense of future prosperity and by exacerbating inequalities.

Countries that deplete natural resources in favour of short-term gains are putting their economies on an unsustainable development path. While indicators such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) are traditionally used to measure economic growth, the report argues measuring changes in natural, human, social and produced capital offers deeper insight into the extent to which growth is sustainable.

The report tracks the wealth of 146 countries between 1995 and 2018, by measuring the economic value of renewable natural capital (such as forests, cropland, and ocean resources), non-renewable natural capital (such as minerals and fossil fuels), human capital (earnings over a person’s lifetime), produced capital (such as buildings and infrastructure), and net foreign assets. As well as social capital, the report accounts for blue natural capital—in the form of mangroves and ocean fisheries— for the first time.

Download the Changing Wealth of Nations 2021 to read Chapter 15Social Capital and the Changing Wealth of Nations by Dr Matthew Agarwala and Dimitri Zenghelis.

Join Matthew Agarwala, Dimitri Zenghelis, Diane Coyle and Saite Lu for the Wealth Economy Foundation Workshop to learn more about how to account for different assets – including social capital – for a more prosperous, resilient and green future.

Disclaimer: AAAS and E

Friday, February 02, 2007

Capitalism Creates Global Warming

I don't often agree with the right wing flat earth society of climate change and global warming deniers, but in this case I will.

The
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), report issued today in Paris is a prime example of deliberate obfustication of the real source of global warming.

"Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic (human) greenhouse gas concentrations," it says.


Like the flat earthers I find it presumptious to blame humanity for a problem that is not created by people perse but by the political economy we have created.

For tens of thousands of years, humanity has existed, slowly changing our natural envrionment and ecology to meet our needs. However it is with the ascendancy of industrial based capitalism in the period of one hundred years that global warming has increased.

It is not people,"humanity", to blame for this, it is not a "man made" crisis , as if we as a society had consciously created this problem, it is the political economy of capitalism that has produced the climactic, environmental and ecological crisis we now face.

Headlines like this, and generalizations that say humanity is impacting the climate avoids laying the blames squarely where it belongs with the political economic system of capitalism.

Which is exactly what the flat earthers say, they too know that the science and politics of climate change expose capitalism as a zero sum game when it comes to the ecological and environmental crisis we face. Which is why they label all climate science as left wing.


But it is not what the scientists say. They still hide behind euphimisms like "man made", "human activities", than to say what we all know is true. The environmental crisis is the ultimate crisis of Capitalism. But unlike the previous economic crisises of Capitalism this is not one it can solve.

Thus the scientists give cover to the capitalists and their state claiming that we as individuals are to blame for the crisis. You can see it in the campaigns to make us all responsible for our part in helping solve this problem. By consuming of course. Green cars, enviornmentally friendly light bulbs, solar heating, blah, blah.

Global warming man-made, will continue

PARIS - International scientists and officials hailed a report Friday saying that global warming is "very likely" caused by man, and that hotter temperatures and rises in sea level "would continue for centuries" no matter how much humans control their pollution.

Smoke rises from a chemical company's stacks in Hamilton, approximately 50 km (31 miles) south of Toronto, February 1, 2007. Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper moved yesterday to mend his government's frayed international reputation on climate change by dispatching his Environment Minister to Paris for a key conference and promising to join an emergency UN summit on the issue.
Smoke rises from a chemical company's stacks in Hamilton, approximately 50 km (31 miles) south of Toronto, February 1, 2007. Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper moved yesterday to mend his government's frayed international reputation on climate change by dispatching his Environment Minister to Paris for a key conference and promising to join an emergency UN summit on the issue. [Reuters]

The head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, called it a "very impressive document that goes several steps beyond previous research."

A top US government scientist, Susan Solomon, said "there can be no question that the increase in greenhouse gases are dominated by human activities."

The reality is those human acitivities are very specific, they are not the tribal or communal village life we once led. Indeed they are not even the result of hundreds of years of coal burning or thousands of years of slash and burn agriculture.

They are the direct result of coal based steam technology that saw the creation of the industrial revolution and mass manufacturing. The capitalist Fordist production model of the 20th Century and its current expansion in the newly capitalist economies in Asia are resulting in mass climactic, environmental and ecological crisis.

Amadeo Bordiga outlined this crisis of capitalism fifty years ago in his book Murdering The Dead, Capitalism and Other Disasters. Bordiga's Left Wing Communism was not like those of the rest of the left, whether Lennist or the Council Communists, his was a communism that viewed a future society as the administration of things, of processes as Adam Buick writes;

The aim of socialism was to abolish property, not to change its form. Socialism was therefore to be defined not in terms of property in the means of production but in terms of social arrangements for using them:

When the socialist formulas are correct the word property is not to be found but possession, taking possession of the means of production, more precisely exercise of the control or management of the means of production, of which we still have to determine the precise subject. [1958]10

Bordiga went on to identify 'society' as this subject, so that he was in effect offering the following definition of socialism: a system of society based on the social control of the means of production.

Bordiga was adamant that socialism did not mean handing over control of the use - and thus effective ownership - of individual factories and other places of work either to the people working in them or to the people living in the area where those factories or places of work were situated. Commenting on a text by Marx, he wrote that socialist society was opposed:

to the attribution of the means of production (the land in our case) to particular social groups: fractions or particular classes of national society, local groups or enterprise groups, professional or trade union categories. [1958]11

Furthermore:

The socialist programme insists that no branch of production should remain in the hands of one class only, even if it is that of the producers. Thus the land will not go to peasant associations, nor to the class of peasants, but to the whole of society. [1958]12

Demands such as 'the factories for the workers', 'the mines for the miners' and other such schemes for 'workers' control' were not socialist demands, since a society in which they were realised would still be a property society in the sense that parts of the productive apparatus would be controlled by sections only of society to the exclusion of other sections. Socialism, Bordiga always insisted, meant the end of all sectional control over separate parts of the productive apparatus and the establishment of central social control over all the means of production.

So, for Bordiga, in a socialist society there would be no property whatsoever in the means of production, not just of individuals or of groups of individuals, but also not of groups of producers nor of local or national communities either. The means of production would not be owned at all, but would simply be there to be used by the human race for its survival and continuation in the best possible conditions.

Scientific Administration of Social Affairs

The abolition of property meant at the same time the abolition of social classes and of the state. With the abolition of property there would no longer be any group of people in a privileged position as a result of controlling land or instruments of production as their 'property', and there would be no need for any social organ of coercion to protect the property of the property holders and to uphold their rule in society. Social classes and the political state would eventually, in the course of a more or less long transition period, give way to 'the rational administration of human activities'. Thus Bordiga was able to write that 'if one wants to give a definition of the socialist economy, it is a stateless economy' [1956-7]. 13 He also wrote that, with the establishment of socialism, social organisation would have changed 'from a social system of constraint on men (which it has been since prehistory) into a unitary and scientifically constructed administration of things and natural forces' [1951].14

Bordiga saw the relationship between the party and the working class under capitalism as analogous with that of the brain to the other parts of a biological organism. Similarly, he envisaged the relationship between the scientifically organised central administration and the rest of socialist society in much the same terms. Indeed, Bordiga saw the administrative organ of socialist society as the direct descendant of the party in capitalist society:

When the international class war has been won and when states have died out, the party, which is born with the proletarian class and its doctrine, will not die out. In this distant time perhaps it will no longer be called a party, but it will live as the single organ, the 'brain' of a society freed from class forces. [1956-7]15

In the higher stage of communism, which will no longer know commodity production, nor money, nor nations, and which will also see the death of the state. . . the party. . . will still keep the role of depository and propagator of the social doctrine giving a general vision of the development of the relations between human society and material nature. [1951]16

Thus the scientifically organised central administration in socialism would be, in a very real sense for Bordiga - who was a firm partisan of the view that human society is best understood as being a kind of organism - the 'social brain', a specialised social organ charged with managing the general affairs of society. Though it would be acting in the interest of the social organism as a whole, it would not be elected by the individual members of socialist society, any more than the human brain is elected by the individual cells of the human body.

Quite apart from accepting this biological metaphor, Bordiga took the view that it would not be appropriate in socialism to have recourse to elections to fill administrative posts, nor to take social decisions by 'the counting of heads'. For him, administrative posts were best filled by those most capable of doing the job, not by the most popular; similarly, what was the best solution to a particular problem was something to be determined scientifically by experts in the field and not a matter of majority opinion to be settled by a vote.

What was important for Bordiga was not so much the personnel who would perform socialist administrative functions as the fact that there would need to be an administrative organ in socialism functioning as a social brain and that this organ would be organised on a 'scientific' rather than a 'democratic' basis.

Bordiga's conception of socialism was 'non-democratic' rather than 'undemocratic'. He was in effect defining socialism as not 'the democratic social control of the means of production by and in the interest of society as a whole', but simply as 'the social control of the means of production in the interest of society as a whole'.

It was a solution to the crisis of capitalism that, as Adam Buick correctly points out, had much in common with a North American Syndicalist idea; Technocracy.

" The technocratic aspects of Bordiga's 'description of communism' were ignored by most of those influenced by him, including to a large extent the members of the group with which he was associated (the International Communist Party)."

Technocracy evolved out of the post WWI crisis of the limitations of Fordist production, and influenced by Thorstien Veblen viewed the crisis as one of the domination of capitalism over efficient, effective use of resources, human, material and energy. They called it the crisis of the price system.

And like Bordiga their solution was a centralized administration of energy and material resources. The abolition of wages, prices, labour value, all exchange values and the rational distribution of resources based on their ultimate use value, that is of their worth as energy outputs.

And like Bordiga, Howard Scott the main proponent of Technocracy saw not a democratic structure for his Technate, the directorship of Technocracy in North America, but a scientific community responsible for the organization and distribution of scarce resources.

As Marx pointed out advanced Capitalism is all about the commodification of all relationships, and as such leads to the ultimate end of competing capitals into a centralized capital.

That production rests on the supreme rule of capital. The centralization of capital is essential to the existence of capital as an independent power. The destructive influence of that centralization upon the markets of the world does but reveal, in the most gigantic dimensions, the inherent organic laws of political economy now at work in every civilized town. Marx

It is this centralization of capitalism that allows for the centralization of administration and planning through the governance of a self managed society which is what socialism is. And only with the socialization of production and consumption can we solve this ultimate crisis of capitalism which is the challenge of living without producing waste and its resulting environmental and ecological imprint which is what global warming is.

Since the modern form of Capitalism is Fordism, mass machinery, the automation of production, which includes its modern forms such as computerization, mass communications, it also provides us with the technology to liberate ourselves from capitalist production. It allows us to use technology to centralize production in an ecologically sound manner. It is the centralization of automation, computerization, not of people.

This was the vision of Marx who identified automation as the final stage of capitalism and the machinery of its doom.
Like Veblen and Scott, the scientist Norbert Wiener showed this was possible with his work on cybernetics. And current studies in the organic nature of technology, that it functions as biological organism, was already predicted by Marx in his work the Grundrisse.



As long as the means of labour remains a means of labour in the proper sense of the term, such as it is directly, historically, adopted by capital and included in its realization process, it undergoes a merely formal modification, by appearing now as a means of labour not only in regard to its material side, but also at the same time as a particular mode of the presence of capital, determined by its total process -- as fixed capital.

But, once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of machinery (system of machinery: the automatic one is merely its most complete, most adequate form, and alone transforms machinery into a system), set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages. In the machine, and even more in machinery as an automatic system, the use value, i.e. the material quality of the means of labour, is transformed into an existence adequate to fixed capital and to capital as such; and the form in which it was adopted into the production process of capital, the direct means of labour, is superseded by a form posited by capital itself and corresponding to it. In no way does the machine appear as the individual worker's means of labour.

Its distinguishing characteristic is not in the least, as with the means of labour, to transmit the worker's activity to the object; this activity, rather, is posited in such a way that it merely transmits the machine's work, the machine's action, on to the raw material -- supervises it and guards against interruptions. Not as with the instrument, which the worker animates and makes into his organ with his skill and strength, and whose handling therefore depends on his virtuosity. Rather, it is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker, is itself the virtuoso, with a soul of its own in the mechanical laws acting through it; and it consumes coal, oil etc. (matières instrumentales), just as the worker consumes food, to keep up its perpetual motion. The worker's activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the opposite.

The science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their construction, to act purposefully, as an automaton, does not exist in the worker's consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the machine as an alien power, as the power of the machine itself. The appropriation of living labour by objectified labour -- of the power or activity which creates value by value existing for-itself -- which lies in the concept of capital, is posited, in production resting on machinery, as the character of the production process itself, including its material elements and its material motion.

The production process has ceased to be a labour process in the sense of a process dominated by labour as its governing unity. Labour appears, rather, merely as a conscious organ, scattered among the individual living workers at numerous points of the mechanical system; subsumed under the total process of the machinery itself, as itself only a link of the system, whose unity exists not in the living workers, but rather in the living (active) machinery, which confronts his individual, insignificant doings as a mighty organism. In machinery, objectified labour confronts living labour within the labour process itself as the power which rules it; a power which, as the appropriation of living labour, is the form of capital. The transformation of the means of labour into machinery, and of living labour into a mere living accessory of this machinery, as the means of its action, also posits the absorption of the labour process in its material character as a mere moment of the realization process of capital.

The increase of the productive force of labour and the greatest possible negation of necessary labour is the necessary tendency of capital, as we have seen. The transformation of the means of labour into machinery is the realization of this tendency. In machinery, objectified labour materially confronts living labour as a ruling power and as an active subsumption of the latter under itself, not only by appropriating it, but in the real production process itself; the relation of capital as value which appropriates value-creating activity is, in fixed capital existing as machinery, posited at the same time as the relation of the use value of capital to the use value of labour capacity; further, the value objectified in machinery appears as a presupposition against which the value-creating power of the individual labour capacity is an infinitesimal, vanishing magnitude; the production in enormous mass quantities which is posited with machinery destroys every connection of the product with the direct need of the producer, and hence with direct use value; it is already posited in the form of the product's production and in the relations in which it is produced that it is produced only as a conveyor of value, and its use value only as condition to that end. In machinery, objectified labour itself appears not only in the form of product or of the product employed as means of labour, but in the form of the force of production itself.

The development of the means of labour into machinery is not an accidental moment of capital, but is rather the historical reshaping of the traditional, inherited means of labour into a form adequate to capital. The accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general productive forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed into capital, as opposed to labour, and hence appears as an attribute of capital, and more specifically of fixed capital, in so far as it enters into the production process as a means of production proper.

Machinery appears, then, as the most adequate form of fixed capital, and fixed capital, in so far as capital's relations with itself are concerned, appears as the most adequate form of capital as such. In another respect, however, in so far as fixed capital is condemned to an existence within the confines of a specific use value, it does not correspond to the concept of capital, which, as value, is indifferent to every specific form of use value, and can adopt or shed any of them as equivalent incarnations. In this respect, as regards capital's external relations, it is circulating capital which appears as the adequate form of capital, and not fixed capital.

Further, in so far as machinery develops with the accumulation of society's science, of productive force generally, general social labour presents itself not in labour but in capital. The productive force of society is measured in fixed capital, exists there in its objective form; and, inversely, the productive force of capital grows with this general progress, which capital appropriates free of charge. This is not the place to go into the development of machinery in detail; rather only in its general aspect; in so far as the means of labour, as a physical thing, loses its direct form, becomes fixed capital, and confronts the worker physically as capital. In machinery, knowledge appears as alien, external to him; and living labour [as] subsumed under self-activating objectified labour. The worker appears as superfluous to the extent that his action is not determined by [capital's] requirements.

The full development of capital, therefore, takes place -- or capital has posited the mode of production corresponding to it -- only when the means of labour has not only taken the economic form of fixed capital, but has also been suspended in its immediate form, and when fixed capital appears as a machine within the production process, opposite labour; and the entire production process appears as not subsumed under the direct skillfulness of the worker, but rather as the technological application of science. [It is,] hence, the tendency of capital to give production a scientific character; direct labour [is] reduced to a mere moment of this process. As with the transformation of value into capital, so does it appear in the further development of capital, that it presupposes a certain given historical development of the productive forces on one side -- science too [is] among these productive forces -- and, on the other, drives and forces them further onwards.

To the degree that labour time -- the mere quantity of labour -- is posited by capital as the sole determinant element, to that degree does direct labour and its quantity disappear as the determinant principle of production -- of the creation of use values -- and is reduced both quantitatively, to a smaller proportion, and qualitatively, as an, of course, indispensable but subordinate moment, compared to general scientific labour, technological application of natural sciences, on one side, and to the general productive force arising from social combination [Gliederung] in total production on the other side -- a combination which appears as a natural fruit of social labour (although it is a historic product). Capital thus works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating production.

Marx Grundrisse Ch. 13


To end our enslavement to the machines as alienated labour, hence the frustration and powerlessness we feel when confronting this current ecological crisis, by recognizing the limitations of their use by capitalism, can only be resolved through the transformation of capitalist society into a socialist society based on industrial ecology and social ecology.

This cannot be done by carbon credits, green policies, caps on industrial pollution, etc. etc., but by the end of capitalism and the liberation of the machinery of capitalism to be used to solve our ecological crisis. Green consiousness is not enough, we need a real Green Revolution, a socialist revolution.

It requires no great penetration to grasp that, where e.g. free labour or wage labour arising out of the dissolution of bondage is the point of departure, there machines can only arise in antithesis to living labour, as property alien to it, and as power hostile to it; i.e. that they must confront it as capital. But it is just as easy to perceive that machines will not cease to be agencies of social production when they become property of the associated workers. In the first case, however, their distribution, i.e. that they do not belong to the worker, is just as much a condition of the mode of production founded on wage labour. In the second case the changed distribution would start from a changed foundation of production, a new foundation first created by the process of history.
Marx Grundrisse Ch. 16


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Sunday, December 11, 2022

Social media engagement style may be linked with perceived social connectedness

Experiment involving mock social media site identifies key differences between passive, reactive and interactive styles of usage

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PLOS

An experimental task delineates among passive, reactive and interactive styles of behaviour on social networking sites 

IMAGE: THE AUTHORS FOUND THAT INDIVIDUALS DISPLAYING MORE INTERACTIVE STYLES OF USAGE REPORTED STRONGER FEELINGS OF SOCIAL CONNECTEDNESS AND SOCIAL CAPITAL. view more 

CREDIT: GERD ALTMANN, PIXABAY, CC0 (HTTPS://CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/PUBLICDOMAIN/ZERO/1.0/)

A new experimental task, involving a mock social networking site, can group people into three distinct styles of social media use—passive, reactive and interactive. Moreover, data from a large online sample suggests that these styles of social media use may be related to psychological well-being, with more interactive users reporting greater feelings of social connectedness than passive or reactive users, according to a new study published this week in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Daniel Shaw of Aston University, UK, and colleagues.

Despite the wealth of research into the psychological impact of social networking site (SNS) usage, inconsistent findings have prevented any firm conclusions from being drawn. While some studies have concluded that social media usage is associated with increased social connectedness and reduced loneliness, other report detriments to loneliness and well-being with greater use of such platforms. 

In the new work, the researchers developed a computerized task to measure styles of usage on a mock SNS platform. They administered the SNS Behavior Task (SNSBT) online to 526 individuals, who also completed questionnaires on their levels of loneliness, sense of belonging, social connectedness, online social capital, and who answered questions about their Facebook usage and friend network.

The SNSBT grouped users into three discrete groups depending on how often they clicked “Next,” “Like,” or “Share” on 90 images presented to them on the mock SNS. On average, passive users, about 39% of those in the study, clicked “Next” most often, on 85% of images. Reactive users, 35.4% of the study, most often clicked either “Next,” 59% of the time, or “Like,” 36% of the time. Interactive users, 25.7% of participants, mostly clicked “Like,” 51% of the time, or “Share” 20% of the time.

Analysis of the data revealed that interactive users had, on average, more Facebook friends, spent more time on Facebook, and reported greater feelings of social connectedness and social capital than passive or reactive SNS users. However, this study could not determine if any causative or directional link between these factors exists, and more work is needed to understand the effects of potential confounding factors on these relationships.

The authors conclude that the simple SNSBT tool they developed, now publicly available, can help researchers quantitatively differentiate between SNS usage styles, and overcome the limitations of self-report data, enhancing future research in the field of cyberpsychology.

Dr. Daniel Shaw adds: “This study introduces a new tool with which researchers can measure different styles of engagement on social networking platforms, and indicates that our style of engagement can be more important for our psychological wellbeing than the amount of time we spend on social media.”

Dr. Charlotte Pennington adds: “Individuals displaying more interactive styles of usage on our platform reported stronger feelings of social connectedness and social capital compared with those who showed more reactive or passive behavior. Our team has developed the first mock social networking site that can be used to measure natural styles of usage, free from the ethical concerns that arise when people log into their own phones.”

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In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS ONEhttps://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0276765

Citation: Shaw DJ, Kaye LK, Ngombe N, Kessler K, Pennington CR (2022) It’s not what you do, it’s the way that you do it: An experimental task delineates among passive, reactive and interactive styles of behaviour on social networking sites. PLoS ONE 17(12): e0276765. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0276765

Author Countries: UK, Germany, Ireland

Funding: This study was supported by an internal grant from Aston, awarded to DJS (PI), CP, KK and LK (Co-Is). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Sunday, December 18, 2022

Contemporary Japanese politics and anxiety over governance

Ken’ichi Ikeda (Doshisha University)

Book Announcement

DOSHISHA UNIVERSITY

Chapters start by revealing the declining impacts of social capital on politics, the shrinking range of political parties from which to choose, and the mixing of Asian values with liberal democratic values. Then, by conceptualizing and empirically examining anxiety over governance, i.e., the perception of excessive risk for future governance, Ikeda explores the links of anxiety to Japanese political behavior. While the high regard for democratic politics lowers anxiety among the Japanese, the changes in Japanese political behavior/environment and culture contribute to a generally high level of anxiety, which also had a significant negative impact on the evaluation of countermeasures against COVID-19.

    Chapter 1 captures the changes in Japanese political behavior in the 21st century by contrasting social capital and political actors as determinants. A gradual decline in social capital and weakening of the ties with political actors occurred. By examining the elections from 1983 to 2019, especially the 2009 election that switched power from the long-dominant Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), Chapter 1 shows that the transition of power to the DPJ in the 2009 election was not supported by the social capital of civil society, but rather by perceptions regarding the political actors. The DPJ administration ended along with a decline in their reputation, whereas what is visible in the LDP administration after regaining power is a decline in the prospective expectations on the administration. 
   Chapter 2 examines the changes that have occurred in micro-level vote choice and macro-level meaningfulness since 1996 when voters became entitled to cast two votes in every national election in both Houses. Voting behavior is a choice for a set of alternatives, i.e., a set of political parties, but voters do not vote from the full range of the set as available choices; rather, they vote from a limited set of parties. On the other hand, the set of possible party choices defines the sense of meaningfulness that voting brings, i.e., the subjective empowerment on national politics. In fact, voters’ perceived set of party choices fluctuated in multiple LDP- and DPJ-centered clusters, and vote choices were basically distributed among possible choice sets of parties in each cluster. The LDP-centered clusters were consistently stable in determining vote choice, while the DPJ-centered clusters were less stable, and vote choice for the DPJ was rather heavily dependent on selective cues provided by its political actors. After the collapse of the DPJ administration, the perceived set of possible political parties to choose from has been greatly reduced to for or against LDP-centered clusters, along with the sense of empowerment.
    Chapter 3 examines whether the Japanese are unique in Asia and the world (which is often claimed) and whether such uniqueness is linked to the Japanese people’s social capital and their support for democracy, using extensive international comparative data from the Asian Barometer and World Values Surveys over a 20-year period. Although the Japanese are outliers in the Asian value system, which consists of the two dimensions of “vertical emphasis” and “harmony orientation,” in that the Japanese are weak in these characteristics, Japan is not uniquely positioned on the cultural map of the world. Nevertheless, Japanese people’s attitudes and actions are influenced by Asian values in terms of general trust and political participation, which are formed through social interactions with others, whereas this is not the case in terms of support for liberal democracy, which is enculturated by the post-war formal education. Overall, the Japanese may not necessarily be capable of making political and social decisions in a value-consistent manner, which may have a negative impact on the operation of the process of politics.
    Chapter 4 examines Japanese idiosyncrasy in their perception of social and national risk. In the World Values Survey, the degree of anxiety about future unemployment, education, and possible involvement in war, terrorism, and civil war perceived by the Japanese is considerably higher than objective indicators, demonstrating excessive risk perception, termed the “anxiety over governance index.” It was presumed that this excessiveness comes from Japanese people’s sense of worry over the future governance of their country. Analyses confirmed the excessive level of risk perception among the Japanese and revealed that this perception was reduced when the country was perceived to be democratically governed, i.e., the index was precisely related to perceptions of governance. Finally, anxiety over governance was more conceptually sophisticated as a pair conception, i.e., political distrust and anxiety over governance expressing diffuse negative evaluations of the past and the future, respectively.
    Chapter 5 explores the structure of Japanese anxiety over governance in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite Japan’s relatively good control during its first wave, an international comparative survey demonstrated that not only was there an overperception of risk, but the intensity of fear (risk perception) was positively correlated with a low evaluation of government handling ability, especially among the Japanese, which is consistent with Chapter 4. An Internet survey on the first general election of the Kishida administration in October 2021 revealed that Japanese excessive risk perception corresponded to the newly constructed direct measure of anxiety over governance, indicating that it was indeed anxiety about the future direction of Japanese politics and political dysfunction. Anxiety was reduced by perceptions of Japan’s degree of democracy, while its high level was explained by the cumulative negative effects of factors such as nonfunctioning social capital, reduced party choice, and inconsistent values.
    Chapter 6 examines a possible countervailing approach from citizens’ perspectives using an analysis of the 2021 election. While criticizing the government in the face of anxiety over governance, many Japanese are less involved in politics, even when confronted with the pandemic. However, the analyses indicated possible pathways for the Japanese to engage in politics, starting with protecting their everyday lives. The book closes by arguing that such grassroots movements are one way to reduce Japanese people’s anxiety over governance.


[Book URL] http://www.routledge.com/9781032159331

[About the author] Dr. Ken’ichi Ikeda is a professor in the Department of Media Studies at Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan since April 2013, after 21 years of teaching at the University of Tokyo. He has been involved in many national/international survey research as the Principal Investigator of Japan, such as Japanese Election Study, World Values Survey, Asian Barometer, and Comparative Study on Electoral Systems(CSES).

Sunday, September 04, 2022

COMPASSIONATE CAPITALI$M

‘Social Bonds’ Help People. Investors in Them Get Paid.


When Rook Soto lost his law enforcement job in 2010 for health reasons, he had big medical bills and had to take temporary jobs to survive. For a month, he was homeless and lived out of a van.

Soto had heard about coding academies that help people become software engineers, but couldn’t afford the tuition. Then he found Pursuit, a nonprofit group that offers coding classes for free as long as he shares a percentage of his future earnings.

After 10 months of training at Pursuit, Soto got a job in 2018 with a $85,000 salary a year. He now makes $200,000 a year and owns a house in Norwalk, Conn. “From being homeless to owning a decent home, that would never have happened without this career,” he tells Barron’s.

Pursuit’s program is one of the thousands of new bonds aiming to finance socially beneficial causes while delivering financial returns to investors. Typically issued by government agencies and financial institutions, these so-called “social bonds” use their proceeds to fund job training, healthcare, affordable housing, among other projects.   

Singapore’s Women’s Livelihood Bond offers microloans to women entrepreneurs in southeast Asia, while the Tokyo government is planning to sell a bond to help the city prepare for the next big earthquake. The pandemic has also spurred a lot of bonds around the world that helped expand hospital capacity, produce protective gear, or support healthcare workers. 

Social-bond issuance jumped from just $20 billion a year pre-Covid to well above $200 billion annually since 2020. There’s also been a rise of the so-called “sustainability bonds,” which package environmental and social projects in a bundle. 

When social bonds were first introduced a decade ago, investment returns were usually tied to the success of the program they funded. The world’s first social bond in the U.K. raised £5 million to fund a program that helps reduce the reoffending rate of prisoners. The program reached its goal seven years later, which translated to an annual return of 3%.

An opposite example was a similar program at New York’s Rikers Island backed by Goldman Sachs

Because the recidivism rate didn’t drop as much as expected, Goldman and Bloomberg Philanthropies, a partner in the project, both lost money.

To avoid such high risks, many social bonds issued in recent years aren’t linked to any specific performance target. Just like regular bonds, investors are guaranteed to get their money back, plus fixed-term income, unless the issuer becomes insolvent. There might be some bonus payment if the program is extra successful.

“These social metrics are very hard to compute, and the market is not ready for that yet,” says Candace Partridge, social and sustainability bonds data manager at Climate Bonds Initiative, a London-based organization.

This doesn’t mean social bonds can use the money unmonitored. Issuers usually release a framework describing how they plan to use the proceeds. A group of independent “verifiers”, such as Sustainalytics and Moody’s, then evaluates whether the program meets their criteria to be labeled as a social bond.

“For us, impact investing has to have a direct and measurable outcome associated with it,” says Steve Liberatore, who manages Nuveen’s ESG-focused fixed-income strategies, “The direct knowledge of where that capital is being deployed has always been critical.” Nuveen holds socials bonds in many of its portfolios.

Nonetheless, the system is largely based on voluntary guidelines. There is currently no relevant regulation in the U.S. The European Union is developing a “social taxonomy” that officially defines which economic activities are contributing to the bloc’s social goals, but the progress has been stalled this year. 

It will be a difficult task, since there is no universal standard about what’s socially good. 

For example, some affordable housing programs aim to help low-income buyers finance their first house, but critics question whether it’s just a different way of selling mortgages. “These people already have a down payment,” says Partridge, “It really isn’t about poverty, as opposed to projects that put people in city housing, who legitimately have no home.”

Things can become even trickier if investors consider the environmental impact of a project as well. Some infrastructure projects, for example, might not be climate friendly or energy efficient—even though they are beneficial for local communities.

Another problem: Companies, institutions or even countries might have alleged misconduct on some issues while making positive contribution to others. For example, some fashion brands have funded many sustainable programs, but are accused of human rights negligence in their supply chains. This makes it difficult to draw a clear line.

Generally speaking, social bonds aren’t expected to make profits, as their economic benefits are usually long-term and wide-reaching. There are exceptions. By investing in people and upping their skills, programs like Pursuit’s could generate foreseeable cash flow for investor return.

Pursuit issued a new bond in 2020, raising $12 million to help 1,000 low-income workers move up the social ladder. And its investors, led by Switzerland-based Blue Earth Capital, will take a 5% to 15% cut from the fellows’ salaries—only if they get a new job in tech—for four years. That translates to a 7% estimated annual return. 

“The financial success of the fellows is linked to the success for us as the lender,” says Amy Wang, Blue Earth’s head of private debt, “This model ensures that the accountability is always there.”

Unlike philanthropic work that relies on external donations, the bond structure allows such programs to become self-sustaining and scalable, says Stuart Spodek, a portfolio manager at


BlackRock

and board member of Pursuit, “As the model proves itself, I’d expect to see more institutional capital coming to the market.”

Write to Evie Liu at evie.liu@barrons.com

Source: https://www.barrons.com/articles/social-esg-bonds-investing-51662048966?siteid=yhoof2&yptr=yahoo

Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Labour Is Capital


An interesting article I came across from the Italian Left Communist group; Countdown provocatively titled; Marxism is Dead! Long Live Marxism! which deals with the fact that in todays Capitalist economy work has no intrinsic value, that is being a shoemaker is of no more importance than working for the Colonel at Kentucky Fried Chicken.

The rise of the so called service economy in North America and Europe, and the end of industrialization in these countries, has seen industrialization shipped offshore but it has also seen service work shipped offshore, call centres, computer programing, etc.

Once upon a time the proletariat was seen as blue collar industrial workers today with Capitalisms ascendance around the globe the proletariat is everywhere, waged and unwaged, working in factories or at home, no longer is there a commons for peasants, the peasants have moved to the cities to become the informal economy of the shanty towns.The revolutionary ideas of the elder Herr Dr. Marx now become more prophetic, that labour as abstract labour, as the creator of value, as the very essence of capitalism, is not free, is not liberated but everywhere enslaved to the machinery of capital itself.

Capitalism has no face, only masks as Marx said. The new capitalism the shareholder stakeholder capitalism of today, where we identify as workers, consumers, citizens, stockholders, is the abstract captialism that Marx predicted.
The capitalist is one expression of capitalism the machine, the worker/consumer/citizen/shareholder is another. Both are needed for the continuation of capitalism itself. Capitalism can only be abolished now with the abolition of the proletratiat, through its self recognition of itself as the very source and being of captialism.

It is not a matter of smashing the machines like the Luddites, or of nationalisation,or of decalring the State to be socialist, but of recongizing that we are the machine of capitalism and that we can rehape our society to our needs, not the need for making Quarterly profits. The moment we have a mass recognition that our subjective feelings of alienation, which result in many spectral or spectacular forms, is our alienation from the system we have created, will allow us to take over our lives, and thus end the system which is out of our control. This then is the spectre haunting globalization it is the contradiciton facing those who want to promote global capitalism and those who oppose it. They are both dancers in this pantomine but the point they miss is who is playing in the band. The band is those who have taken autonomous action to change their conditions, such as the current revolutions that have occured in Latin America especially Argentina and Bolivia.

As Marx said at that moment the proletariat will have reached class conciousness not of itself as a class, which is in opposition to capitalism, but as a class for itself, as the very source of capitalism. Communism then becomes possible, not as a form of state or governance, through our selfish decision that the abundance we create is available for all to use. Which until this moment in history has been limited by the capitalist means of production and distribution.



The lifespan of orthodox Marxism mirrored
the rise of this industrial working class in Europe
and North America. The critique of the bourgeois
order produced by this class reflected its exclusion
from bourgeois politics, the parasitism of unproductive
capital, and the erosion of its position
in the work process. It was a claim for inclusive
status on behalf of industrial labour as industrial
labour, but not a critique of capital, as the value
form of this industrial labour. The Marxism that
rested on and drew sustenance from this new
industrial working class and its struggle, was a
critique of capital, but from the standpoint of a
class protective of its status as a class. The spontaneous
socialism of the working class movement
produced a Marxism limited to the sovereignty of
industrial labour in the bourgeois order.
The critique to be found in the late works of
Marx (Grundrisse (1857-8), Theories of Surplus Value
(1862-3), Das Kapital (1864-1867)) was a critique
that was never consistently taken up by the leading
theoreticians of the 2nd and 3rd Internationals.
This was Marx’s critique of capital as a critique of
the value form of labour. It was a critique of the
very form taken by labour in the capitalist mode
of production – abstract labour as the source of
value, and constitutive of the form of social
domination characteristic of this mode.2 It was
therefore a critique pointing to the necessity of the
abolition of value producing labour as such.3 This
critique was unappreciated not because of the
personal failings of the leading Marxists of this
tradition. In the attempt to establish Marxism as a
source of authority for working class struggles,
those very struggles, rooted as they were in a
specific stage of development of industrial capital,
and generative of specific forms of social consciousness,
militated against a full grasp of Marx’s
mature critique. In the context of the period in
which it was written, Marx’s critique of the value
form was ahead of its time, pointing as it did to a
development of abstract labour and value that lay
only in the future.

Capital was conceptualised by Orthodox
Marxism as a thing separate from and opposed to
labour. Capital and labour were thus polarities,
discreet opposites, each standing in an external
relation to the other. Labour was an entity whose
essence was denied by the existence of capital – the
source of its oppression understood as something
outside it. This dualist conceptualisation is to a
large extent explicable if it is remembered that the
parties of the 2nd International were an organic
part of the first real working class movements.
These movements were struggling to assert the
integrity and dignity of industrial labour as a
legitimate producer of wealth. While Social
Democracy articulated this sentiment in the form
of a collectivist state socialism, syndicalism offered
a purely corporatist version, and Bolshevism a
modernising variant in the circumstances of backwardness.
But all were in the last analysis variants
of a class representation of labour as wage labour.
By contrast, Marx’s critique of capital was as a
form of appearance of value, the substance of which
was alienated (abstract) labour. The critique and
negation of capital was at the same time the critique
and negation of abstract labour – the abolition of
the proletariat as a class. The implication of Marx’s
critique is that the expression of the domination
of capital through the medium of a class of
capitalists is secondary; while the exercise of
domination through the value form (the rule of
an abstraction which presents itself as natural
necessity) is primary. Insofar as the critique of
capital by Orthodox Marxism equated the abolition
of capital with the abolition of the capitalist
class (a change of property relations), it had no
critique of labour as wage labour.
Understanding capital as a thing, a selfcontained
entity, meant understanding labour as
an equally self-contained entity. In such an
understanding the source of change for capital or
labour derived not from the internal contradictions
of the capital-wage labour relation, but from forces
external to either side of the polarity. It followed
from this that Orthodox Marxism had no
understanding of the dialectic of the social relation
of capital – of the necessary development and
dissolution of this relation. Without an understanding
of the self-movement, the selfdevelopment
of this relation, the strategic aim of
Orthodox Marxism, in all its variants, was to
represent the proletariat in its finished, capitalist
form, as wage labour.

The significance of the Keynesian approach to the crisis
of capital, was that, on the one hand, it understood
the importance of wages for profitability, and
therefore stability of accumulation, and at the same
time understood this as a means of incorporating
the proletariat into the capitalist political economy.
Keynesian state socialism offered a solution to the
underconsumption aspect of the crisis of accumulation,
and neatly complemented the commercial
strategy of mass marketing/advertising (pioneered
in the US in the twenties) that would create the
citizen-consumer. Fordist mass consumption thus
provided a neutralising of the class struggle over
distribution and a hoped for stimulus to economic
growth (through the avoidance of chronic depression).
Bourgeois citizenship as consumption became
central to the Social Democratic strategy of
achieving the inclusion of the working class in
bourgeois society, and thereby “civilizing”
capitalism: providing due recognition of the claims
of labour and stabilising capital’s circuit of
reproduction. Inclusion for the majority of the
working class, which was achieved in the capitalist
heartlands by the 1960s, thus completed the historic
task of Classical Social Democracy. This explains
why Social Democracy has eventually had to
transmute into a managerialist version of economic
liberalism. This latest explicit embrace of the market
should not be seen as a betrayal of its earlier
principles, but a natural terminus for them. It is
merely the logical extension of a strategy of securing
for the “included” masses their individual rights
as citizen-consumers (i.e. as full participants in the
valorisation of capital)

The history of the capitalist mode of production
in the second half of the twentieth century is the
history of the developing hegemony of the value
form as the regulator of social life. The basis of the
capital relation, which was its origin, and remains
its essential underpinning, is the separation of the
direct producers from the means of production, a
separation ensuring the selling of labour power,
which as abstract labour (labour abstracted from
any aspect of use or skill), constitutes the substance
of value. This mode of production demands the
perpetual revolutionising of the means of production
(division of labour/mechanisation) to produce
commodities in the shortest possible time (highest
possible labour productivity). Such revolutionizing
drives the homogenisation of work (i.e. skills
become more perfectly interchangeable, and the
identification of workers with particular kinds of
useful work is eroded). A mode of production
resting on abstract labour thereby inevitably
produces a homogenisation of the work process.
This development was not of course the smooth
unfolding of a pre-established trajectory. It was at
every juncture the outcome of class struggles
generated by the wage-labour/capital relation. The
struggles of the period 1875-1950, for inclusion and
for the autonomy of work, eventually resolved into
a reconfiguration of the terms of engagement of
wage-labour and capital. As the challenge to the
right of the bosses to manage was defeated, the
workers’ movement was gradually reconstituted
around a different perspective. In the context of
the democratic counterrevolution after the Second
World War, the struggle to establish juridical rights
for all workers regardless of skill or job performance
– over unemployment, guaranteed pay (a living
wage), conditions of work, pensions – displaced
the struggle for the autonomy of work; the new
emphasis on the statutory paralleled the homogenisation
of work. Not surprisingly this trend
spelled the demise of craft based trades unionism
and the diminishing resonance in the social
consciousness of class distinctions based on
occupational categories.

The birth of Orthodox Marxism (the first post-
Marx Marxism) coincided with a working class
experiencing the erosion of predominantly precapitalist
social relations by capitalist commodity
production. Its most class-conscious elements
aspired to the sovereignty of industrial labour
whilst preserving the community and solidarity
of established craft traditions. The working class
being formed was in effect straddling two modes
of production – it was already experiencing the
formal subsumption of labour, but not yet the real
subsumption of labour (Marx 1976, pp.1019-1038).
For semi-capitalist labour in transition to fully
capitalist labour, oppression and exploitation was
seen to lie outside the act of labour itself (in a class
of landlords and employers). The Marxism that
was built on, and drew sustenance from this class
experience relied on the categories of base and
superstructure, forces and relations of production,
and economic determinism, but not those of value
and abstract labour. By contrast, in the fully
developed capitalist labour anticipated by Marx
(the product of real subsumption), social
domination was intrinsic (internal) to labour itself;
it lay in the very act of value producing labour.
But the new industrial proletariat, and the Marxists
who championed its cause, would not fully
grasp the nature of a value form that was then
still in the early stages of its development.
Today, the proletariat is incorporated more
firmly into the circuit of the production and
realisation of value via mass consumption, is more
indifferent to the content of work, and thus more
conditioned to the value imperative that flows from
abstract labour. This means that the proletariat will
in the future be less and less able to confront capital
as a force external to itself, and more and more
must experience capital (value) as internal to its
activity, the very form of its (waged and thus
alienated) labour. The value imperative, as a form
of domination experienced as natural necessity,
must be seen by the proletariat as a force that lies
within itself as wage-labour. Marxists can no
longer retail the orthodox view of class struggle
as the struggle against capital as object, external
to the proletariat as subject; the proletarian
struggle must henceforth be seen as a struggle to
abolish itself as labour. This is the theoretical truth
posed by the development of the value form.


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